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posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 10 2016, @10:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the keeping-my-fingers-crossed dept.

For the first time, retired US Air Force officers have published [PDF] an account of an incident on May 23, 1967 when a solar storm nearly fooled American high command into thinking that a Soviet nuclear attack was on the way.

On that day, the US military nuclear command went into panic mode when signals from all three of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) sites in the far northern hemisphere (one apiece at Alaska, Thule in Greenland, and a base in the UK's county of Yorkshire) shut down simultaneously.

These BMEWS stations were positioned over the most likely routes for Soviet ICBMs to come visiting the Land of the Free, and some thought the USSR had worked out a jamming technology that would blind the US ahead of an attack. When the BMEWS went down, this secondary bomber force was put on alert and flash warnings were sent to other nuclear facilities warning them that this might be the big one. But luckily a message from a series of forecasts made it through to central command telling them that it might not be the Soviets causing the issues.

"This is a grave situation," said Delores Knipp, a space physicist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and coauthor of the paper. "But here's where the story turns: things were going horribly wrong, and then something goes commendably right."

Since the 1940s, the US military planners had had evidence of how solar radiation could affect communications systems here on earth. In the mid-1960s the Air Force's Air Weather Service (AWS) had been doing regular solar forecasts to spot this kind of radiation. On May 18, 1967 the AWS spotted an unusually large group of sunspots with intense magnetic fields in one region of the sun. Shortly afterwards this area erupted, causing one of the largest solar storms ever recorded flying towards earth.

"I specifically recall responding with excitement, 'Yes, half the sun has blown away,' and then related the event details in a calmer, more quantitative way," said retired Colonel Arnold Snyder, a solar forecaster at NORAD's Solar Forecast Center, who was on duty that day.

The loss of the BMEWS was flashed both to the military and to government heads. Knipp says that contemporary documents indicate that President Johnson would have received the news. Given the heightened state of alert at the time – Vietnam's summer offensives weren't going well and forces were massing in the Middle East for the Six Day War that broke out days later – the news could have scared some folks into pushing the button.


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Bogsnoticus on Wednesday August 10 2016, @10:38PM

    by Bogsnoticus (3982) on Wednesday August 10 2016, @10:38PM (#386413)

    As opposed to Trump who would push the button because someone said something unflattering about him on tw@tter.

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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @10:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @10:43PM (#386416)

    Trump who would push the button because someone said something unflattering about him

    Trump couldn't even push the button, because his hands are too small!! [Ducks and covers]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @10:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @10:52PM (#386419)

      Trump would push any button in a heartbeat if it made his daughter naked.

    • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday August 10 2016, @11:45PM

      by Gaaark (41) on Wednesday August 10 2016, @11:45PM (#386442) Journal

      And they smell like cabbage!

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @11:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @11:52PM (#386444)

      His hands are only slightly smaller than average [939thebeat.com].

      What they say about men with small hands isn't true [snopes.com].

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 11 2016, @06:17PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 11 2016, @06:17PM (#386700)

        Terry Bollea and the Public Face of Trump had a huge dick that had taken away much of the size from his hands, but the 'real' Trump in fact had an average sized penis, as depicted in the leaked sex tapes from that time he did his friend's daughter.

        Yeah I made that last part up, but it needed to follow a parallel narrative to Bollea's story :) (Hulk Hogan for those that didn't know.)

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 11 2016, @08:52PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 11 2016, @08:52PM (#386782)

        Wot? Some one thinks it is necessary to refute (or "repudiate", if you're Sarah Pallin) the charge that Trump has small hands? It this only because the charge was not tweeted? Everyone knows that Trump has small hands, and everyone knows what that means, and some Second Amendment people might be able to do something about it, by getting him a much smaller gun, I don't know. But wait, he already has a smaller one! Ha ha! [Bob Dole approves this message.]